22/09/2009

An early evening visit on Saturday to the very civilised Greenwich Picture House – "Will you be taking your drinks into the film with you...?" – on Saturday to see Julie and Julia, the biopic cum romcom about US cookery legend Julia Child and the homage New Yorker Julie Powell paid her in the shape of a year-long blog back in 2002/3. In the Julie/Julia Project Powell had the slightly bonkers plan to work and blog her way through all 536 recipes in Child's seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking in just twelve months. As someone who recently went four or five months between blog posts, I have to admire her dedication.

A few weeks ago I read the book of the blog, and enjoyed it. Naturally, the thought of someone finding fame and fortune from a food blog appealed, but what interested me more was the nature of the project itself. Ploughing through a hefty collection of recipes and describing what worked and what didn't; which ingredients were hard to find and which common ones got put to use in new ways; which new techniques were to become part of the regular kitchen repertoire and which would be dropped as soon as the relevant chapter was completed (aspics, mainly)... there was something heroic in the enterprise and something engaging in her personality and style. I maybe found it a little repetitive in the descriptions of various white-out episodes, and I thought it a little disingenuous to gloss over the fact that at some point the project clearly morphed from blog to book-deal, but there was enough foodie detail to keep me interested. I was keen to see how it would translate to the big screen.

The opening credits neatly capture the fact that Julie and Julia is "based on two true stories" and this is the first major difference. While Powell's book featured a few snippets from letters Julia Child and her husband Paul wrote back to the States from various slightly shady diplomatic postings in Europe and Asia, the film devotes at least half its narrative to Julia's journey from frustrated expat wife to a household name (in the US at least). And it does so very successfully too: Meryl Streep is fantastic as Julia Child, and clearly had an absolute hoot playing her, capturing the extraordinary voice and mannerisms pretty much perfectly (I had to check this on YouTube, not having been exposed to any of the original television programmes before). And you can't blame Nora Ephron for making such an effort on the Julia half of the project: it is after all, a great story, what with its glamorous Parisian backdrops and the slightly quirky way the great book seems to have come into being.

The modern-day New York story had very little of the glamour, especially as it oscillated between a scruffy apartment in Queens and a Downtown Manhattan still metaphorically smouldering after September 11, but it had the potential to be just as successful as a story. Unfortunately, it felt a bit as though those making the film cared a lot more for Julia than they did for Julie, painting the blogger's tale with far less colour and characterisation. In the book, for instance, (and presumably the blog), Julie's husband Eric is ever-present in the background, and while we don't get a lot of him personally, we learn enough from the part he plays in any number of escapades to understand why she thinks him a saint (the patron saint of washing up and gimlet making, presumably). In the film, however, Eric is a dweeb who suddenly throws a wobbly when Julie lets her obsession get the better of her. And just as suddenly forgets all about it. A pity.

And there's not enough cooking in the film for my taste, either. There are some good bits about the amount of butter used in French cooking, some entertaining squeamishness at the thought of boiling live lobsters and the famous boeuf bourguignon episode that proves slow cooking and vodka aren't necessarily the wisest combination. But we got next to nothing of the aspic fun, for instance, and Julie apparently managed to debone an entire duck (perhaps the most daunting episode in the entire book) with a single incision. These were frustrating omissions for someone who was mainly there for the food.

Of course I understand that this is not a feature length Nigella food porn adventure, and there's only so much room for such details, especially when you've hit on the brilliant wheeze of telling such a great second story alongside (drawing parallels with house moves, jobs, publishing ventures, dinner parties and so son). But when you think of some of the stuff that was artificially and pointlessly added in to the New York narrative (an entire set of characters seems to have been invented purely to draw a spurious additional parallel with Sex and the City) it seems a shame not to make the foodie element work a bit harder.

But then maybe that's the problem. I'm considering this film from so many different viewpoints – foodie, blogger, blog-reader, book-fan, frustrated writer – that the good old-fashioned filmgoer in me is struggling to see the wood for the trees. I'll do my best... With my most convincing objective hat on, I can recommend this as a light and yet moderately fulfilling film with enough foodie stuff and historical fact to lift it beyond a blah romcom, a few laugh-out-loud moments (although not as many as the lady a few seats along from us seemed to think) and an electric performance from Meryl Streep and her inner Child. The latter alone is reason enough to go.

Afterwards is was back next door to the Rivington Greenwich for welsh rarebit, sardines, steak, chips and a couple of bottles of wine. Lovely.

08/09/2009

After much dithering over how to round off a week on the Isle of Wight – because surely everyone needs a treat after they've been on holiday? – we decided that rather than blow several hundred quid on a combination of boutique hotels and Michelin starred restaurants we'd head back to London and make our own entertainment. If we'd been more organised we'd have engineered a long-promised return to Bailiffscourt (next time) but we'd left it too late, and in the end the London options more than made up for the lack of outdoor hot-tubs and walks on the beach. Well just about.

So on Saturday some last-minute investigation revealed that District 9 was showing at the Greenwich Picture House at an hour that gave us just enough time for a cheeky meal at the bar in the Rivington next door. Why we have only done this a couple of times before is utterly beyond me. It's surely the most perfect combination of food and culture you could possibly find. (I think I've answered my own question there: if there's any sort of contest food – and drink – tend to win over culture every time. Ah well, this time we got it about right and after a fabulous rare burger with rarebit topping and a pair of exemplary eggs Florentine we wandered next door for a couple of moderately harrowing hours of shaky camera prawn massacre. What's not to like?

The highlight of our home-treats weekend, though, was Sunday lunch at Le Café Anglais, Rowley Leigh's majestic emporium just off Queensway. We'd been once before when four of us had effortlessly racked up a bill of such impressive proportions that Antonia's dad hasn't spoken to us since (he was there, incidentally; he's not ostracising us on the basis of our spendthrift ways). It's not that LCA is expensive. Indeed if you managed to restrict yourself to the keenish set-price menus you could eat very well indeed for less than £40-odd a head (assuming you drink from the lower end of a long but manageable wine list). It's just that there's so much gloriously tempting stuff elsewhere on the menu that the chances of anyone actually picking the set menus must be vanishingly small. I'm sure it's happened once or twice. But not that sure.

You've got to love a restaurant that establishes a signature dish for itself – in this case Parmesan custard with anchovy toasts – and then sticks in on a list of hors d'euvres so that both you know and they know you're going to order it (and a couple of others like it) before you even think about having a "proper" starter. And then there's the list of proper starters themselves, which includes such temptations as smoked eel and bacon salad, and mains that include a relatively modestly priced grouse (£25 is practically a bargain compared with the cool £38 it was going for at Hix the other week). The set menu stood no chance.

As well as the Parmesan custard (which is as good as it sounds and surely as obligatory here as the roasted bone marrow is at St John), we snacked on some mackerel paté with a soft boiled egg (a good combination slightly undermined by the fact that we'd swapped toasts so I was spreading an already salty paté on those anchovy toasts) and some artichoke fritters (slightly odd these, a bit too rich in their breadcrumby batter). Meanwhile I was tucking into the beautifully dressed eel and bacon salad (more saltiness!) and we were both washing it all down with some perfect bloody Maries.

Mains were an omelette for the veggie half of the party, accompanied by a choice of quality sides, including a dauphinoise that ticked all the right cheesy, creamy and crunchy boxes. I went for the grouse (natch), which was a trifle underpowering for my taste. It was smartly presented on a copper platter with most of the usual accompaniments – game chips, red current jelly, bread sauce, gravy and watercress. Disappointingly, though, no dense liver on toast, an omission that seemed to work as an omen: the first half of the bird I tackled packed none of the punchy flavour I associate with grouse. To be fair, though, the second flank was much more on the mark, deeper in colour and almost metallic in taste. Might have been the way it was sitting in the oven or to do with where our friend picked up its fatal wound. Either way it was like a different bird. Not for the first time with grouse: a game of two halves.

After a blow-out like this, complete with a carafe (hurrah!) each of burgundy and Chablis and a couple of good espressos we were in no kind of condition for pudding. We called for the bill, reflected on opportunity to find good value in Notting Hill comprehensively passed up, and wandered happily out into the September sunshine. A perfect end to the holiday after all. Well done us.